Buttons in a dream: what does it mean?
Small fastenings that hold a garment together make a precise dream object, and the reported trouble is usually that they will not do up or that one is missing.
How do the four traditions read it?
Each reading below comes from a named tradition and a cited source, so you can see where it came from and decide what fits your dream. The four often disagree, and that is the point: a symbol rarely means one fixed thing, and the distance between Freud, Jung, modern research and myth tells you more than any single verdict could.
How did Freud read this symbol?
Freud would attend to the fastening, since a dream about a garment that will not close has arranged an exposure that is about to happen rather than one that has.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
For Jung the small failing fastening can image something minor holding together something that matters, and the disproportion between the object and the consequence is usually the point.
Our summary of a Jungian reading, in our own words, not Jung's. See Jung, ed., Man and His Symbols (1964).What does modern dream research say?
Under the continuity view these usually come from real clothes and real small frustrations, and dreams of being unable to dress properly sit close to the naked-in-public themes that are among the most reported.
Our summary of the continuity hypothesis, named by Calvin Hall and Vernon Nordby, The Individual and His Dreams (1972). Its correct scope is disputed; see Domhoff (2017) and the replies to him.What do myth and folklore say?
Buttons carried status before they carried much function, and sumptuary rules in several periods specified who might wear how many and of what material. The fastening was a claim about rank.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis (after Frazer; Brewer).How can writers use this symbol?
The same symbol, read as craft material rather than as a dream. What it does on the page, how genres use it differently, and what happens when you turn it inside out. Written for novelists, screenwriters and poets who need the symbol to actually work, and it ends with something to try.
Where does this appear in literature?
The lost button is a superb small detail because it implies a whole domestic situation: whether it gets sewn back on, by whom, and how long it sits in a dish first.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
It supplies a tiny visible failure that a reader reads as a larger one. Structurally it is one of the cheapest ways to show a character not coping.
What are the genre conventions?
Literary fiction uses the tin of spare buttons, which nearly every household has. Historical fiction uses the uniform. Comedy uses the one that goes at the worst moment.
How to subvert it
Write a character sewing on a button badly and being pleased with it.
Try this
Write a coat described entirely through its fastenings. Two hundred words.
Only the first of these names a source. What a symbol does in a story, how genres treat it, how to invert it and what to try are our editorial judgement as writers and editors, not findings from a body of research. They are offered as craft opinion and should be argued with.
The books behind these readings
These are the books this entry actually draws on, not a general reading list. Where a text is in the public domain we link the free copy first, because you should not have to pay for something you can read for nothing. Every edition listed has been checked to exist and to be the right one.
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The Interpretation of Dreams
The source behind every Freud reading in the dictionary. This is the 1913 Brill translation we adapt from, and it is free to read online.
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Man and His Symbols
The accessible Jung, and the honest place to start for the archetype material our Jung readings summarise.
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The Golden Bough
Cross-cultural context for the myth readings. Public domain and free to read online.
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